I imagine a world where people thrive as the natural byproduct of great design.

— Current Works —

Whether athletes or astronauts, c-suite leaders or jailbirds, newscasters or soldiers — in my medical experience all humans seek deeper answers about their health. My search to offer more meaningful solutions drew me to the spheres of entrepreneurship, health and innovation.

I have dedicated my life to studying the human condition. I am driven by the pursuit of understanding what makes us tick and the constant quest to align capital (human and financial) with long-term human empowerment. This drive has powered me to speak around the world — from Melbourne to London, Sydney to Seoul, Shanghai to Los Angeles and back again.

I am a research qualified medical doctor with a Bachelor of Medicine & Surgery, Bachelor of Medical Science, and Masters of Public Health from the University of Melbourne. I sat on the board of VicHealth from 2006 - 2011 and in 2014, and was appointed a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader for my contributions to Public Health. I am the founder and CEO of Convenory, Strategy & Innovation Advisor to Nightingale Housing, and serve as non-executive director for the Chisholm Institute and Chisholm Online. I consult and advise under my own shingle: MDMD. Throughout my career, I have had the honor to collaborate and connect great minds who impact health at the intersection of culture, policy and technology.

Backstory

— In The Beginning—

My ‘field anthropology’ began long before any formal studying. As the daughter of an Associate Professor of Clinical Biochemistry and intensive care nurse, my childhood included breakfast table discussions about the real cause of stomach ulcers and being rewarded with visits to the neonatal ICU.

From the hospital ward to mission control, I developed an early obsession with manned spaceflight. My continued fascination offered a chance to take part in Space Camp, where scientific literacy was the price of entry.

These early experiences and opportunities propelled me to study Medicine, the most human-centric of sciences, with subsequent careers in sports medicine, emergency medicine and corporate and public health.

— When Emotion Met Reason —

Before there was an emergency room, there was a dressing room. Part-time jobs in high-end retail, during my university years, funded my appetite for international travel and my growing connection to the aeronautical community. When I wasn’t plowing through anatomy, chemistry, pharmacology and physics, my time was spent exploring the rituals of self-expression through fashion and design.

I grew intimate with how people relate to their bodies, their wallets, and to each other — to society at large. I witnessed the power of culture and emotion as drivers of human behaviour. What makes sense is often irrelevant, because we feel and identify with what we value.

— Between Worlds —

My tendency to travel between worlds developed unconsciously, before I learned of the often competing processes of emotion and reason. My way of being developed as a bid to adapt to, what was at the time, a dissonant cross-cultural context.

Being Hungarian-Welsh-Chinese-Malaysian growing up in 1980’s Australia, I was caught between an identity as trojan of my local ethnic community and a reluctant participant in a fifth generation game of ‘born-to-rule’. On the one hand, stories of displacement, migration and struggle, and the other, the game of social climbing within patriarchy.

Belonging nowhere provoked anxiety. However, as Kirkegaard famously observed, it is also exhilarating, knowing that I am at liberty to connect with and explore almost anything: “Anxiety is the dizzying prospect of freedom.” World views that emerged from dissonant beginnings, now power my being and have become the lens through which I find truth, beauty and a sense of freedom.

Philosophy

— What is Heath? —

I believe a life worth living, no matter the individual circumstances, embodies the alchemy between meaning, pleasure and time. In modern economies, constant options threaten well-being because they drive what Barry Schwartz coined as the ‘paradox of choice’, and in doing so, dilute salience and therefore enjoyment.

In keeping with our individual truths, the action of choosing well, is what allows us to bridge the divide between ourselves and our potential.

The human experience as we know it is developing into uncharted territory. As technology and globalization solve for distribution, the exquisitely unique, emotional, and cultural needs of individuals and newly forming communities remain unfulfilled.

— How Might We Get There? —

Human values emerge from both biology and story, they are in continual flux.— The equations that govern our lives are non-linear. Today, this flux, and the compounding effects of our rapidly changing experience and environment are without precedent. Incrementally optimising our biology is woefully inadequate. Now more than ever: Logic alone will break our hearts.

Choice, not cholera, has emerged as the most powerful force determining human wellbeing. There is no such thing as a small choice... a single decision can redirect the course of a life.

At best, prevailing approaches to health succeed at returning people to their existing trajectories of decline. The reality, as per public health intelligence, is that lifestyle drives outcomes, and the real engine-room for the creation of new health habits is consumer decision making.

Examined over the arc of time, humanity will collectively self-extinguish or must work out how to thrive in this new terrain. Considered through the lens of probability, how we choose affects the likelihood of one possibility over the other.

— So, How Do I Choose to Invest? —

I believe our best returns come from investment into human empowerment. This demands a strategy and design that acknowledges the structural drivers of behaviour and therefore of health. The journey ahead is not a road-trip towards a cure. The challenges we face today are rarely problems with defined solutions, rather, we come up against continuously changing predicaments.

Forward motion, in an ever more complex, evolving system, involves innovative responses that recognise technology, culture and policy as the major levers that can accelerate us towards constructive lives of purpose.